Teaching About Policing and Race in America
Oceanside High School is located in a suburban, overwhelming White and middle class community on Long Island in New York. The school sponsors an annual Human Relations Day that brings in speakers and sponsor panels on a range of topics including HIV/AIDS awareness, drunk driving, military families, fire safety, and diversity.
I opened a discussion on race in America with two groups of students by examining the February 2015 statement by FBI Director James Comey. He was at Georgetown University on "Hard Truths: Law Enforcement and Race." According to Comey "all of us in law enforcement must be honest enough to acknowledge that much of our history is not pretty. At many points in American history, law enforcement enforced the status quo, a status quo that was often brutally unfair to disfavored groups . . . It is a hard truth that lives on."
The Oceanside students, who were almost all White, agreed with Comey that these were hard truths, but generally favored addressing individual values at home and school rather than more systemic social change. Some were from police families and were grappling with things they heard in the media and their love and concern for family members who put their lives at risk. I expressed support for their efforts to sort out conflicting feelings, but stressed that Comey and protesters were not targeting individuals but a "history" of racism in American society and police forces and other institutions that need to be reformed. I also questioned whether their life experiences in a small isolated White community and racially segregated school effectively prepared them for college and careers in a much larger and more diverse world.
According to the recently released United States Justice Department report the police department in Ferguson, Missouri, where Black teen Michael Brown was shot to death in August 2014 by a White police officer, is guilty of systematic racial bias. Police inFerguson disproportionately ticket and arrest African American men, including for "crimes" like jaywalking, and officials use the revenue collected from the fines to balance the town's budget. The Ferguson Chief of Police, municipal judge, city manager resigned as did two police supervisors after the investigation showed they were linked to racist emails. The Justice Department concluded that the Ferguson Police Department routinely violated the constitutional rights of its Black residents.
Over the winter months I participated in a series of forums and actions growing out of the Summer 2014 killing of Michael Brown and Eric Garner by police officers. Unfortunately, it seemed that at each gathering another unarmed Black man had recently been killed by police officers. In a previous Huffington Post I reported on a student forum on police-community relations at Uniondale High School on Long Island that opened with a dramatic student "die-in."
During this time I met with students at Harvest Collegiate High School in New York City to discuss the impact of the "school-to-prison" pipeline, helped students at Alfred E. Smith High School in Bronx New York organize a petition campaign against the use of metal detectors in minority high schools, was interviewed by Susan Modaress ofInside/Out on the impact of the prison system on Black and Latino children whose family life is disrupted by the arrest and imprisonment of parents, and was a Teaching About Policing and Race in America | Alan Singer:
